This discussion has been locked.

You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Is an Apprenticeship an equally valid pathway to Chartered Engineer - a historical anachronism or the future?

This is National Apprenticeship Week.

An unintended and unfortunate consequence of UK government policies and wider economic changes in the 1980s and 1990s was a very substantial decline in apprenticeships which had served previous generations so well. They didn’t die completely because employers (like the company that I was Training Manager of) understood their value, not just for skilled craft trades, but also as an alternative option to “Graduate Training Schemes” for Engineers and Managers, traditionally leading to HNC type qualifications, but from the mid-2000s increasingly degrees. Initiative was eventually picked up by Government, turning it into a “flagship” policy. This has had an effect, but policy is not implementation and typically the brewery visit has not been well organised (with apologies to those unfamiliar with British vulgar slang). However, changes like this can take years if not decades to “bed in”, so I hope that we will keep trying.

Engineering Council has always been dominated by the academic perspective and relatively poorly connected with employers, therefore it has associated Apprenticeships with Technicians and not with Chartered Engineers, although it accepted that it was possible "exceptionally via bridges and ladders” for a Technician to develop into a Chartered Engineer. Incorporated (formerly Technician) Engineer was also drawn from the Apprenticeship tradition. However, once the qualification benchmark was adjusted to bachelors level, it was also intended to become the “mainstream” category for graduates, with CEng being “premium” or “elite”. Unfortunately the Incorporated category has not been successful and its international equivalent “Technologist” defined as it is by degree content (i.e. less calculus than an “engineer”) also seems equally poorly regarded or even legally restricted in other countries.

Now we have Degree Apprentices coming through, the profession has responded by offering Incorporated Engineer recognition at an early career stage. This should in principal be a good thing and I have advocated it in the past. However, I am seriously concerned that this may also stigmatise them as a “second class” form of professional, as has been the tradition to date.

Over the last few years Engineering Council has adopted a policy encouraging younger engineers to consider the Incorporated Engineer category as a “stepping stone” to Chartered Engineer. Some professional institutions have promoted this often with a particular focus on those “without the right degree for CEng” with some success. However the approach “kicks the can down the road” to the question of how they should subsequently transfer to CEng. There are potentially likely to be some frustrated, disillusioned and even angry engineers, if they find that “progression” is blocked and that they are stuck on a “stepping stone”. We don’t need more unnecessary “enemies” amongst them, we have created enough already.

A further problem is that those with accredited degrees do not expect to require a “stepping stone” and consider IEng to have no value for them or even perhaps at worst insulting. Many employers of Chartered Engineers and the professional institutions are steeped in the tradition of recruiting those with accredited degrees and developing them to Chartered Engineer in around 3-5 years. Other graduate recruiters may be less academically selective, but share similar traditions and expectations.

Is therefore a Degree Apprenticeship an equally valid pathway compared to a CEng accredited (BEng or MEng) full-time undergraduate degree course? Is performance and current capability (aka “competence”) the appropriate frame of reference for comparison, or should those from each pathway be separated academically and considered to be different “types”, or on “fast” and slow tracks”?

As Degree Apprenticeships develop further, there will be those who gain CEng accredited degrees and have work experience via an “even faster track”. My concern is that those graduates from Degree Apprenticeships who are more competent and productive than their age group peers from full-time degree programmes, but disadvantaged in academic recognition terms, may find themselves in a seemingly unfair and anomalous situation.

In addition, those employers who primarily “exploit existing technology” may continue to feel that the Engineering Council proposition is contrary to their interests and discourage engagement. Employers who invest in apprenticeships state that they experience greater loyalty from former apprentices, relative to graduate trainees and often a better return on investment. Whereas the professional institution proposition emphasises different priorities, which may align quite well with Research & Development or Consultancy type business models, but not with Operations and Maintenance or Contracting. My experience as an employer trying to encourage professional engagement was that the Professional Institution concerned advised employees informally to “move on if you want to become Chartered”, because they valued Project Engineering less than Design Engineering. As for management, this was definitely “chartered engineering” if you held the right type of engineering degree and valued if it was “prestigious”. If you didn’t hold the right type of engineering degree and weren’t “highly prestigious” then it wasn't valued much.

If Degree Apprenticeships become more strongly established, do we want to accept them as an equally valid pathway to a range of excellent careers including Chartered Engineer, or do we wish to continue our long-standing policy of treating them as useful but second or third class pathways? Will weasel words of platitude be offered ,whilst existing attitudes and practice are allowed to prevail?

If the answer is we that want to give apprentices equal value, then in the current climate of retribution, should those who have enthusiastically encouraged the stigma and snobbery against them consider falling on their swords? Enthusiasm for excellence in engineering, especially in stretching academic circumstances is a virtue not a crime and I strongly support it. Unfortunately however many around the Engineering Council family, perhaps motivated by a neediness for “status”, seem to have been mainly concerned with rationing access to the Chartered category by other “graduate level” practitioners, and disparaging those drawn from the apprenticeship tradition.

Further Reading

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/a-new-apprenticeship-programme-kicks-off-national-apprenticeship-week-2018

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-law-will-end-outdated-snobbery-towards-apprenticeships

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/further-education/12193128/Theres-been-an-apprenticeship-stigma-for-far-too-long.html

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/theres-still-a-stigma-around-apprenticeships-people-look-down-on-you-3622353-Oct2017/

https://www.fenews.co.uk/featured-article/14816-overcoming-the-apprenticeships-stigma-not-before-time

https://www.bcselectrics.co.uk/news/pushing-back-against-stigma-apprenticeships

‘Stigma against apprenticeships must end,’ says Network Rail boss. Mark Carne, Network’s Rail’s chief executive (Rail Technology News)


https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/national-apprenticeship-week-young-women-stem-apprenticeship-a3781606.html

http://www.aston.ac.uk/news/releases/2017/july/uks-first-degree-apprentices-graduate/

https://www.stem.org.uk/news-and-views/opinions/apprenticeships-better-skills-better-careers

http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/blog/Pages/Why-I-chose-the-degree-apprenticeship-route.aspx

Parents

0 Roy Bowdler over 5 years ago

Someone was kind enough to point me in the direction of an article by Prof Elena Rodriguez-Falcon who is an IET Fellow, although I haven’t met her. She is promoting her institution NMiTE which has been highlighted in an earlier thread. I hold no brief for that, or the journal in which the article was published. However, she also describes some of the “fresh thinking” that I think is needed and I wish her success.

our MEng in integrated engineering will be taught not in four but three years, 46 weeks a year, during which time our engineers in training will be learning by solving real challenges from partner employers 100 per cent of their time. So, with hands-on learning, we will have no lectures. Absolutely none! There are no set textbooks either.

Our learners will not sit traditional exams. They will instead demonstrate their competencies and skills by addressing challenges from engineering and manufacturing companies.

We are also slaying perhaps the most sacred of cows in UK engineering; we will not require our learners to have maths and physics A-level.

A recent prominent article about NMiTE in The Times highlighted many of the underlying problems: a deeply conservative profession stuck in the past coupled with a public perception that professional engineers with degrees and masters don blue overalls, hard hats and man production lines…. Readers… will know the damage that is done when negative stereotypes are perpetuated. Teenagers and their parents see engineering as male, manual and dirty. The reality is that engineers, like other professionals, whether accountants, lawyers, or journalists, spend most of their time at desks or in meetings solving big challenges and earning high salaries!

Note; I agree that engineering isn’t just, or even mainly, about the wearing of overalls, hard hats and supposedly male attributes. I also agree that the work of many engineers can be compared equally with other professions, considered by some to have “higher status”. I can also empathise with those who move primarily in circles where “status” is important, either socially or professionally such as in academia. After all for a senior academic, “status” is the equivalent of productivity and financial performance for a company manager or SME owner.

Unfortunately however, these type of arguments have contributed towards academic and social class based snobbery, frequently directed towards apprentices and those from that pathway. At worst apprentices are negatively stereotyped as undereducated wielders of oily rags, or cloth cap Ronnie Corbett figures who should know their place, at the bottom of the social pile. Whether highly educated and high status engineers such as university professors like it or not, skilled and more practically oriented professionals are an equally valuable part of the practice of engineering.

Teenagers and parents who identify role models like senior managers in major companies, successful self-employed specialists or SME principals drawn from the apprenticeship tradition may have a different perspective. An “ideal market” rewards productivity rather than status, so there are many examples of higher earnings for practical delivery, rather than “conceptual thinking” at desks and discussions in “meetings”. The public perception of “engineers” and “engineering careers” will not be improved by “different tribes”, within it seeking higher status at the expense of others. We don’t need negative stereotyping of any kind and should reserve our distain only for the unethical.

The bigger issue was highlighted by the huge number of comments attracted by the article, over 100 comments last time I looked, largely from people purporting to be engineers. I do hope pupils and parents don’t see them as I can’t think of a better way of putting people off engineering than reading these misogynistic and old-fashioned views. What had set off the ire of this phalanx of crusty engineers and led to such an outpouring of disdain? It was the very idea that maths and physics A-level won’t be compulsory to get a place at NMiTE! For us, the dogmatic insistence on A-level maths and physics is at the heart of the problem with attracting enough people into engineering. But can it be done without dumbing down the profession? Quite frankly the outpouring showed it is dumbed down already.

https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/skills/2018/07/introducing-engineering-course-without-level-maths

https://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/ns_spotlight_engineering_supplement_july_2018.pdf

I find it interesting to compare Prof Rodriguez-Falcon’s plan, with the “degree apprenticeship” model developed by my Further Education College and University partners and I (as an employer’s training manager) about 15 years ago, later adapted as a basis for some currently approved degree apprenticeships. I wonder what the attitude of Engineering Council Accreditors and PEIs will be , given “the ire of this phalanx of crusty engineers offering such an outpouring of disdain”? I wonder what her reaction would be to IEng accreditation for the degree, which would be their traditional response? With tut-tutting, patronising and superior attitudes thrown in! I presume that she will employ an alternative mechanism, to select only the most “able” prospective students in lieu of top A level grades in maths and science? If whatever that mechanism is produces excellence, then I would wish to offer my encouragement and support, but she may need to continue to be brave in the face of opposition and make good use of influential friends.

I await with further interest the proceedings of this upcoming conference https://epc.ac.uk/events/new-approaches-to-engineering-higher-education-conference/ . I also hope that our Engineering Council accepts that fresh thinking is needed. If they haven’t already, they also need to rebalance the perspectives of employers and other stakeholders, not just engineer’s clubs, university professors and a wider “establishment” who have dominated the dialogue to date. It seems a bit rich to me that some academics criticise apprenticeships for narrow specialisation, or offering only limiting skills without adaptable knowledge, while schools and universities run an “exam factory competition” designed to place people into silos of “the best” (potential CEng) and “the rest” as teenagers. Engineering for most practitioners involves life-long learning and if we are going to take a “fix” at the age of around the age of 22, someone with a good apprenticeship including a higher qualification, will typically on average be more effective and productive in most engineering roles.

We need a system that encourages young people to seek technical careers, then to grow that career by optimising and where necessary updating their capability to satisfy the market’s needs. This has to be a balance between their abilities, personal attributes and evolving circumstances. If we narrow the range of people on that journey, intentionally or otherwise, by gender, social class, age, or other means, then we lower our national competitiveness. Over the last twenty years, higher education has increasingly come to rely on overseas students and the need for good “mainstream” engineers and technicians, has lacked “home grown” talent through the loss of apprenticeships. In principle, I’m very supportive of our universities, especially so as they have become essential engines for the local economy in many parts of the country. However, having become so dominant , partly at the cost of the polytechnic model and of further education, something needs to rebalance.

How technical knowledge and skills are acquired and recognised is an important part of any discussion around “new approaches”. My challenge to academic friends is; that having achieved a dominant position, please ensure that you deliver effectively for all those capable of achieving in engineering, especially including those in employment, who are not preoccupied with the “competition” that has become the education system. I agree in part with Prof Rodriguez-Falcon, because there are certainly influential “dog in the manger” activists in our PEI community who will resist change, including some academics.

We have de-facto 50% of young people achieving “graduate status”. Are Technicians and Engineers somehow “less bright” than average? Are knowledge and skills acquired in a vocational context of less value, than academic concepts? How many experienced practitioners are actually of graduate and post-graduate calibre, but under-recognised? Some reasonable stakeholders in our profession suggest that vice-versa applies and have low confidence in academic recognition as an indicator of productive capability. There is good evidence that many of a previous generation from the (“HNC type”) apprenticeship tradition, performed and continue to perform at least as well as most more recent MEng graduates. I should also note that these apprentices were paid from the age of 16-18, not indebted by many tens of thousands of pounds by the age of 21-22 and looking for a job.

For the avoidance of doubt here, I’m not attacking MEng courses, or any form of academic excellence. Perhaps many of these should also be an apprenticeship, ideally one accessible to those “progressing” as engineers, not just “the cream” of 18 year old academic achievement?   I’m also not arguing “apprenticeship good - degree bad”. There have been and continue to be, some pretty poor excuses for the type of “apprenticeship” that is needed to set someone on to a potential Chartered Engineer pathway or even for that matter to become a competent Engineering Technician. Some examples of excellence can also be found here https://worldskills.org/ and I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the recently retiring president https://worldskills.org/media/news/fond-farewells-and-appreciation-outgoing-worldskills-president-simon-bartley/ An electrical contracting businessman by background, who also led UK Skills before it was abolished, in the “bonfire of the quangos” and with it this also https://www.nationaltrainingawards.com/. I was a volunteer judge for what its worth.

Are we destined to be forever stuck in the tired and outdated divide between academic (“superior status”) and vocational (“inferior status”) in engineering and technology?
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel

Reply

0 Roy Bowdler over 5 years ago

Someone was kind enough to point me in the direction of an article by Prof Elena Rodriguez-Falcon who is an IET Fellow, although I haven’t met her. She is promoting her institution NMiTE which has been highlighted in an earlier thread. I hold no brief for that, or the journal in which the article was published. However, she also describes some of the “fresh thinking” that I think is needed and I wish her success.

our MEng in integrated engineering will be taught not in four but three years, 46 weeks a year, during which time our engineers in training will be learning by solving real challenges from partner employers 100 per cent of their time. So, with hands-on learning, we will have no lectures. Absolutely none! There are no set textbooks either.

Our learners will not sit traditional exams. They will instead demonstrate their competencies and skills by addressing challenges from engineering and manufacturing companies.

We are also slaying perhaps the most sacred of cows in UK engineering; we will not require our learners to have maths and physics A-level.

A recent prominent article about NMiTE in The Times highlighted many of the underlying problems: a deeply conservative profession stuck in the past coupled with a public perception that professional engineers with degrees and masters don blue overalls, hard hats and man production lines…. Readers… will know the damage that is done when negative stereotypes are perpetuated. Teenagers and their parents see engineering as male, manual and dirty. The reality is that engineers, like other professionals, whether accountants, lawyers, or journalists, spend most of their time at desks or in meetings solving big challenges and earning high salaries!

Note; I agree that engineering isn’t just, or even mainly, about the wearing of overalls, hard hats and supposedly male attributes. I also agree that the work of many engineers can be compared equally with other professions, considered by some to have “higher status”. I can also empathise with those who move primarily in circles where “status” is important, either socially or professionally such as in academia. After all for a senior academic, “status” is the equivalent of productivity and financial performance for a company manager or SME owner.

Unfortunately however, these type of arguments have contributed towards academic and social class based snobbery, frequently directed towards apprentices and those from that pathway. At worst apprentices are negatively stereotyped as undereducated wielders of oily rags, or cloth cap Ronnie Corbett figures who should know their place, at the bottom of the social pile. Whether highly educated and high status engineers such as university professors like it or not, skilled and more practically oriented professionals are an equally valuable part of the practice of engineering.

Teenagers and parents who identify role models like senior managers in major companies, successful self-employed specialists or SME principals drawn from the apprenticeship tradition may have a different perspective. An “ideal market” rewards productivity rather than status, so there are many examples of higher earnings for practical delivery, rather than “conceptual thinking” at desks and discussions in “meetings”. The public perception of “engineers” and “engineering careers” will not be improved by “different tribes”, within it seeking higher status at the expense of others. We don’t need negative stereotyping of any kind and should reserve our distain only for the unethical.

The bigger issue was highlighted by the huge number of comments attracted by the article, over 100 comments last time I looked, largely from people purporting to be engineers. I do hope pupils and parents don’t see them as I can’t think of a better way of putting people off engineering than reading these misogynistic and old-fashioned views. What had set off the ire of this phalanx of crusty engineers and led to such an outpouring of disdain? It was the very idea that maths and physics A-level won’t be compulsory to get a place at NMiTE! For us, the dogmatic insistence on A-level maths and physics is at the heart of the problem with attracting enough people into engineering. But can it be done without dumbing down the profession? Quite frankly the outpouring showed it is dumbed down already.

https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/skills/2018/07/introducing-engineering-course-without-level-maths

https://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/ns_spotlight_engineering_supplement_july_2018.pdf

I find it interesting to compare Prof Rodriguez-Falcon’s plan, with the “degree apprenticeship” model developed by my Further Education College and University partners and I (as an employer’s training manager) about 15 years ago, later adapted as a basis for some currently approved degree apprenticeships. I wonder what the attitude of Engineering Council Accreditors and PEIs will be , given “the ire of this phalanx of crusty engineers offering such an outpouring of disdain”? I wonder what her reaction would be to IEng accreditation for the degree, which would be their traditional response? With tut-tutting, patronising and superior attitudes thrown in! I presume that she will employ an alternative mechanism, to select only the most “able” prospective students in lieu of top A level grades in maths and science? If whatever that mechanism is produces excellence, then I would wish to offer my encouragement and support, but she may need to continue to be brave in the face of opposition and make good use of influential friends.

I await with further interest the proceedings of this upcoming conference https://epc.ac.uk/events/new-approaches-to-engineering-higher-education-conference/ . I also hope that our Engineering Council accepts that fresh thinking is needed. If they haven’t already, they also need to rebalance the perspectives of employers and other stakeholders, not just engineer’s clubs, university professors and a wider “establishment” who have dominated the dialogue to date. It seems a bit rich to me that some academics criticise apprenticeships for narrow specialisation, or offering only limiting skills without adaptable knowledge, while schools and universities run an “exam factory competition” designed to place people into silos of “the best” (potential CEng) and “the rest” as teenagers. Engineering for most practitioners involves life-long learning and if we are going to take a “fix” at the age of around the age of 22, someone with a good apprenticeship including a higher qualification, will typically on average be more effective and productive in most engineering roles.

We need a system that encourages young people to seek technical careers, then to grow that career by optimising and where necessary updating their capability to satisfy the market’s needs. This has to be a balance between their abilities, personal attributes and evolving circumstances. If we narrow the range of people on that journey, intentionally or otherwise, by gender, social class, age, or other means, then we lower our national competitiveness. Over the last twenty years, higher education has increasingly come to rely on overseas students and the need for good “mainstream” engineers and technicians, has lacked “home grown” talent through the loss of apprenticeships. In principle, I’m very supportive of our universities, especially so as they have become essential engines for the local economy in many parts of the country. However, having become so dominant , partly at the cost of the polytechnic model and of further education, something needs to rebalance.

How technical knowledge and skills are acquired and recognised is an important part of any discussion around “new approaches”. My challenge to academic friends is; that having achieved a dominant position, please ensure that you deliver effectively for all those capable of achieving in engineering, especially including those in employment, who are not preoccupied with the “competition” that has become the education system. I agree in part with Prof Rodriguez-Falcon, because there are certainly influential “dog in the manger” activists in our PEI community who will resist change, including some academics.

We have de-facto 50% of young people achieving “graduate status”. Are Technicians and Engineers somehow “less bright” than average? Are knowledge and skills acquired in a vocational context of less value, than academic concepts? How many experienced practitioners are actually of graduate and post-graduate calibre, but under-recognised? Some reasonable stakeholders in our profession suggest that vice-versa applies and have low confidence in academic recognition as an indicator of productive capability. There is good evidence that many of a previous generation from the (“HNC type”) apprenticeship tradition, performed and continue to perform at least as well as most more recent MEng graduates. I should also note that these apprentices were paid from the age of 16-18, not indebted by many tens of thousands of pounds by the age of 21-22 and looking for a job.

For the avoidance of doubt here, I’m not attacking MEng courses, or any form of academic excellence. Perhaps many of these should also be an apprenticeship, ideally one accessible to those “progressing” as engineers, not just “the cream” of 18 year old academic achievement?   I’m also not arguing “apprenticeship good - degree bad”. There have been and continue to be, some pretty poor excuses for the type of “apprenticeship” that is needed to set someone on to a potential Chartered Engineer pathway or even for that matter to become a competent Engineering Technician. Some examples of excellence can also be found here https://worldskills.org/ and I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the recently retiring president https://worldskills.org/media/news/fond-farewells-and-appreciation-outgoing-worldskills-president-simon-bartley/ An electrical contracting businessman by background, who also led UK Skills before it was abolished, in the “bonfire of the quangos” and with it this also https://www.nationaltrainingawards.com/. I was a volunteer judge for what its worth.

Are we destined to be forever stuck in the tired and outdated divide between academic (“superior status”) and vocational (“inferior status”) in engineering and technology?
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel

Children

No Data

Is an Apprenticeship an equally valid pathway to Chartered Engineer - a historical anachronism or the future?

Community Rules & Guidelines